Mystery

Gobekli Tepe (Turkish for "Potbelly hill"), a site six miles from the site of Urfa featuring massive carved stones, may be the world’s oldest temple, erected by hunter-gatherers on the highest point of an elongated mountain ridge some fifteen kilometers northeast of the town of Sanliurfa (formerly Urfa/Edessa) in southeastern Turkey.

Construction begins in the tenth millennium BCE (around 11,500 years ago), before the advent of sedentism.

Together with Nevali Çori, the site, currently undergoing excavation by German and Turkish archaeologists, has revolutionized understanding of the Eurasian Neolithic.

Göbekli Tepe is the oldest human-made place of worship yet discovered.

At the main excavation site, standing stones are arranged in circles; on the hillside beyond are four other rings of pillars, only partially excavated.

In the center are two large, T-shaped pillars surrounded by slightly smaller stones facing The monoliths are decorated with carved reliefs of animals and of abstract pictograms.

The pictograms may represent commonly understood sacred symbols, as known from Neolithic cave paintings elsewhere.

Erected around 9000 BCE, the tallest pillars are sixteen feet high and weigh between seven and ten tons.

Some are elaborately carved; their broad faces featuring foxes, lions, snakes, boars, and scorpions.

The carefully carved figurative reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, asses, snakes and other reptiles, insects, arachnids, and birds, particularly vultures and waterfowl.

Vultures also feature in the iconography of the Neolithic sites of Çatalhöyük and Jericho; it is believed that in the early Neolithic culture of Anatolia and the Near East the deceased were deliberately exposed in order to be excarnated by vultures and other birds of prey. (The head of the deceased was sometimes removed and preserved—possibly a sign of ancestor worship.)

At the time the shrine was constructed the surrounding country was much more lush and capable of sustaining this variety of wildlife, before millennia of settlement and cultivation resulted in the near–Dust Bowl conditions prevailing today.

Archaeologists, led by German Klaus Schmidt, have found abundant remains of wild game here —gazelles, boars, sheep, and red deer, together with vultures, cranes, ducks, and geese—suggesting that those who frequented the site had not yet domesticated animals or farmed.

Moreover, there are none of the telltale signs of settlement for contemporaneous sites in the region, such as cooking hearths, houses, trash pits, or the clay fertility figurines so ubiquitous elsewhere, indicating the site’s function as solely a religious center.

To carve, erect, and bury rings of multi-ton stones would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed.

Schmidt has theorized that the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the foundation for the development of complex society.

Indeed, at a prehistoric village site only twenty miles away, geneticists have found evidence of the world’s oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates that agriculture developed there about 8500 BCE, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe‘s construction.

Few humanoid forms have surfaced at Göbekli Tepe, but include a relief of a naked woman, posed frontally in a crouched position, that Schmidt likens to the Venus accueillante figures found in Neolithic north Africa; and of at least one decapitated corpse surrounded by vultures.

Some of the pillars, namely the T-shaped ones, have carved arms, which may indicate that they represent stylized humans (or anthropomorphic gods).

Another example is decorated with human hands in what could be interpreted as a prayer gesture, with a simple stole or surplice engraved above; this may be intended to represent a temple priest.

While the structures are primarily temples, smaller domestic buildings have been uncovered more recently.

Despite this, it is clear that the primary use of the site was cultic and not domestic.

Schmidt believes this "cathedral on a hill" was a pilgrimage destination attracting worshipers up to a hundred miles distant.

Butchered bones found in large numbers from local game such as deer, gazelle, pigs, and geese have been identified as refuse derived from hunting and food prepared for the congregants.

Through the radiocarbon method, the end of stratum IIII can be fixed at c. 9000 BCE; its beginnings are estimated to 11,000 BCE or earlier.

Thus, the structures not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel; they were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, i.e., the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry around 9000 BCE.

The quarries for the statues used at the Göbekli Tepe temple complex are located on the plateau itself; some unfinished pillars have been found there in situ.

The biggest unfinished pillar is still six point nine meters long; a length of nine meters has been reconstructed.

This is much larger than any of the finished pillars found so far.

The stone was quarried with stone picks.

Bowl-like depressions in the limestone rocks may already have served as mortars or fire starting bowls in the Epipaleolithic.

There are some phalloi and geometric patterns cut into the rock as well; their dating is uncertain.

The site is deliberately backfilled sometime after 8000 BCE: the buildings are covered with settlement refuse that must have been brought from elsewhere.

These deposits include flint tools like scrapers and arrowheads and animal bones.

Byblos points and numerous Nemrik-points characterize the lithic inventory; there are also Helwan-points and Aswad-points.

Recent DNA analyses of bottle gourds found at several sites throughout the Americas has resolved a long-standing mystery, as well as adding evidence establishing the early date of domestication of the bottle gourd plant.

Before the analyses, archeologists could only speculate that it had probably floated across the Atlantic, as the bottle gourd is native to Africa and not the Americas, but upon examining the DNA, they found that the American samples most closely matched the varieties of the African bottle gourd found in Asia, not Africa.

It was thus concluded that early migrants from Asia had deliberately brought the bottle gourd to the Americas, at least ten thousand years ago.

Archaeologists think that the original and evolutional shape of clay pottery was modeled on the shape of certain gourd varieties.

The avocado tree also has a long history of cultivation in Central America.

The oldest evidence of avocado use was found in a cave located in Coxcatlán, Puebla, Mexico, that dates to around 10,000 BCE.

The unique language of the Sumerians, the titular founders of civilization, seems to be unrelated to any other known language, defunct or otherwise.

Who they were, and how their civilization sprang forth, remains a mystery.

The Kish tablet, a limestone tablet found at Tell al-Uhaymir, Babil Governorate, Iraq—the site of the ancient Sumerian city of Kish, is dated to around 3500 BCE (middle Uruk period).

A plaster cast of the artifact is today in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

The Kish tablet is inscribed with proto-cuneiform signs, and may be considered the oldest known written document.

The writing is, however, still purely pictographic, and represents a transitional stage between proto-writing and the emergence of the partly syllabic writing of the cuneiform script proper.

The "protoliterate period" of Egypt and Mesopotamia is taken to span about 3500 to 2900 BCE.

The Kish tablet is thus more accurately identified as the first document of the Mesopotamian protoliterate period.

Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar are the cities of the plain mentioned in the Bible as being destroyed by divine intervention.

They may possibly be found in the ruins of five large settlements in the fertile plain southwest of the Dead Sea.

Bab edh-Dhra (bāb al-dhrā'), the site of an Early Bronze Age city located near the Dead Sea, in Wadi Araba, has been forwarded as a candidate for the location of Biblical Sodom.

Bitumen and petroleum deposits have been found in the area, which contain sulfur and natural gas (as such deposits normally do), and one theory suggests that a pocket of natural gas led to the incineration of the city.

Recently, researchers have hypothesized that the back plume of a massive meteor that exploded in Austria in 3123 BCE may have caused a Middle East disaster that sparked the Sodom and Gomorrah legend.

The major cities of the Indus valley civilization contain a few large buildings including a citadel, a large bath—perhaps for personal and communal ablution—differentiated living quarters, flat-roofed brick houses, and fortified administrative or religious centers enclosing meeting halls and granaries.

Essentially a city culture, Harappan life is supported by extensive agricultural production and by commerce, which includes trade with Sumer in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq).

The people make tools and weapons from copper and bronze but not iron.

Cotton is woven and dyed for clothing; wheat, rice, and a variety of vegetables and fruits are cultivated; and a number of animals, including the humped bull, are domesticated.

Harappan culture is conservative and remains relatively unchanged for centuries; whenever cities are rebuilt after periodic flooding, the new level of construction closely follows the previous pattern.

Although stability, regularity, and conservatism seem to have been the hallmarks of this people, it is unclear who wields authority, whether an aristocratic, priestly, or commercial minority.

Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first of the Third Dynasty-pyramidal structures, is constructed over faience tile-lined underground burial chambers for the king and his family.

The other nine, lacking any official inscriptions, offering rooms, and other funerary features common to earlier and later tombs, are clearly not tombs, made the more clear by the fact that no human remains seem ever to have been interred in these structures.

The rooms of the various pyramids, devoid of furnishings, ornament, or fragments of such, contain only lidded chests made of stone.

Filling the rooms underneath the Step Pyramid are about forty thousand stone jars and vessels of every shape and size, manufactured of slate, metamorphic schist, basalt and diorite, an extremely hard granitic rock.

Numerous smooth and glossy vessels made of hard stone feature long narrow necks and wide, rounded bellies and display no trace of tool marks.

Some theorists propose that these, along with some or all the blocks of limestone, were actually manufactured items, cast, in the manner of cementitious limestone concrete, in specialized molds.

The Egyptian builders may have mixed their superior silico-aluminate cement mortar with fossil-shell limestone rubble to produce high quality limestone concrete.

The Land of Punt, also called Pwenet, or Pwene by the ancient Egyptians, is a trading partner known for producing and exporting gold, aromatic resins, African blackwood, ebony, ivory, slaves and wild animals.

Information about Punt has been found in ancient Egyptian records of trade missions to this region.

At times, Punt is referred to as Ta netjer, the "land of the god.” The exact location of Punt remains a mystery.

Most scholars today believe Punt was located to the southeast of Egypt, most likely on the littoral of the Horn of Africa in what is today Puntland in northern Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and the Red Sea coast of Sudan.

However, some scholars point instead to a range of ancient inscriptions that locate Punt in Arabia.

Pharaoh Sahure of the Fifth Dynasty (twenty-fifth century BCE) organized the earliest recorded Egyptian expedition to Punt although gold from Punt is recorded as having been in Egypt in the time of king Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt.

Gold Lunulae: Crescent-Shaped Necklaces of the Early Bronze Age (c. 2200–2000 BCE)

Gold lunulae, distinctive crescent-shaped necklaces, represent some of the earliest and most finely crafted goldworkof the Early Bronze Age. Though found primarily in Ireland, they have also been discovered in Portugal, Great Britain, and Brittany, suggesting widespread trade or shared cultural traditions during this period.

Dating and Craftsmanship

• While no lunula has been directly dated, artifact associations suggest they were made between 2200 and 2000 BCE (Needham 1996, 124).
• Fewer than 200 gold lunulae are known, and it is possible that they were produced by only a handful of skilled artisans.

Manufacturing Techniques: The Kerivoa Evidence

The most revealing find comes from Kerivoa, Brittany, where:

• Three lunulae were discovered inside a box containing sheet gold and a gold rod.

• The rod had its terminals hammered flat, suggesting that lunulae were created by hammering a gold rod into a thin sheet before shaping it into a crescent.

• Decoration was applied using a stylus, impressing intricate patterns into the surface.

• Additional lunulae from Saint-Potan (Brittany) and Harlyn Bay (Cornwall) show identical tool impressions, indicating they were all made with the same stylus, likely by a single craftsperson.

• The contents of the Kerivoa box may have been the artisan’s toolkit, reinforcing the idea that lunulae production was a specialized and highly skilled craft.

Design and Cultural Significance

• The decorative patterns on gold lunulae strongly resemble contemporary Beaker pottery motifs, hinting at possible symbolic or cultural connections.
• They also resemble amber and jet spacer necklaces, which are believed to be slightly later in date, but their ideological relationship remains unknown.

Unanswered Questions: Ideology and Function

• The symbolic meaning of lunulae remains uncertain. Their crescent shape may have had astronomical, religious, or status-related significance.
• The ideological connection between different materials used for Early Bronze Age necklaces—gold, amber, and jet—remains a mystery, suggesting that material choice may have carried distinct social or ritual importance.

Conclusion

Gold lunulae stand as remarkable achievements of Bronze Age metalworking, highlighting the technical expertise, trade networks, and artistic traditions of early European metalworkers. The Kerivoa evidence suggests that some were produced by a single workshop or individual, emphasizing the importance of specialized craftsmanship in the emerging metal economies of the Early Bronze Age.